Your Body Clock and Your Health

It’s time to get familiar with your chronotype —because getting in tune with your circadian rhythm could make your nights more restful and your days more energized.

- By Kaitlyn Pirie

Do you struggle to stay up at night or have a hard time waking up in the morning?

It could be due to your chronotype, or your body's natural preference to fall asleep at a certain time. It all comes down to your unique circadian rhythm. "Circadian' is formed from Latin words-it means 'around a day," says Alicia Roth, Ph.D., a clinical health psychologist who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine at Cleveland Clinic.

"On Earth our day is 24 hours, so that's how our body clock is pretty much set." In fact, Roth points out, the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to scientists who made an important discovery about circadian rhythm: There's a gene that encodes a protein that builds up in cells at night and breaks down during the day. In other words, every cell in your body follows your circadian rhythm or internal clock. "But everything's on a little bit of a different clock, so we have clocks for sleep and waking, and clocks for hormones and digestion and bowel movements and organ function," says Roth. "When we're talking about chronotypes, we're mostly talking about our sleep-wake clocks."

Your chronotype, or circadian typology, refers to your natural levels of alertness over a 24-hour period, says Natalie Dautovich, Ph.D., the environmental fellow for the National Sleep Foundation and an associate professor in the department of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Some people have a chronotype that makes them more alert at sunrise, while others have one that keeps them alert at night.

THE PHYSIOLOGY BEHIND CHRONOTYPES